Welcome to the Asylum!

[J.A. Terranson]

On Mon, 20 Jan 2014, Riad S. Wahby wrote:

> "J.A. Terranson" <measl at mfn.org> wrote:
> > Riad Wahby is our "Curator".
> 
> And a poor one indeed :)

Ditto.  My sole advantage is I have free colo, and lots of extra hardware, 
with a n/c 100mbit connection.  As long as I don't have to spend money, I 
can support just about anything.
 
> Lest anyone misinterpret the quotes, I assure you I do nothing of the
> sort. The *only* filtering that goes on is subscriber whitelisting.
> 
> I've been subscribed to cpunks in one form or other since the early 90s,

Same.

> and thinking back to those days makes the worries about SNR on the list
> now seem like nothing. By my recollection it wasn't until circa 2001
> that any of the distributed remailer nodes even had sender whitelisting;
> even with the worst flaming the SNR now is an order of magnitude better
> than what we'd get prior to Ericm's LNE.com node.

Oh yes!  I'm sure that toad is still swamped with incoming spam, 
especially after it started to be used as an attack vector in the mid 90s.

this *may* be an issue going forward, but I doubt it: only admins can open 
up mailman to attack vectors, and that may even be closed by now.  I've 
been running mailman since it came out, although I havent updated any of 
the installed bases in a few years (as fresh upgrades were always a 
nightmare under mailman).  Mailman is incredibly easy to install (once you 
get past the *awful* instructions and just figure it out!), and doesn't 
open itself to the many types of crazyness that majordomo did (not to say 
that majordomo wasnt a great platform for it's time - it was.  But traffic 
up until 95/96 wasn't that heavy either.  Another thing that will be nice 
about mailman vs majordomo is you won't get the situation where your posts 
come in from what appears to be different places: in the archives I noted 
that I had multiple posts under a half dozen "names", depending on the 
workstation I was sitting at when I hit send.  Majordomo made a LOT of 
assumtions which usually turned out to be wrong...

The repeater is the key.  I think it should be a stand alone piece of 
code, not a script, so that I can run it as any other service (or, 
*someone* can run it as a service!). There should be somekind of fallback 
for the repeater as well: if it goes down, the entire CDR shouldn't go 
with it.  Maybe a heartbeat system coupled with elections as to 
masters/backup slaves.  This kind of setup has DNS implications though: 
the TTL would need to be *very* low, and other repeaters who need to step 
up in case of outage need a mechanism to change the DNS for the repeater.

-=rsw > 


//Alif

-- 
Those who make peaceful change impossible,
make violent revolution inevitable.

An American Spring is coming:
   one way or another.